Recent work in disability studies has challenged scholars to rethink the ways in which disability intersects with issues of gender, class, and race. In her book Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, Simi Linton calls for a reexamination of how disability studies can be integrated into fields such as queer studies, women's studies, and race and ethnic studies as a way to explore issues of marginalized identities. Scholars have noted the ways in which disabled bodies and the disabling of bodies can be part of a larger colonizing project. Indeed, Edward Wheatley has illuminated this trend in his recent work on Gerald of Wales, and similar connections are apparent in Mandeville's Travels, The Book of Margery Kempe, and other medieval texts dealing with identity, marginalization, and transgressive boundaries. Papers might examine any example of an intersection between conquest and disability broadly defined, colonial representations of the disabled body/mind, representations of violence and disablism, religious identities and the disabled subject, etc. We are also open to any work that seeks to address the redefinition of what disabled bodies (both human and material) and the disabling of these bodies means in relation to larger issues of postcolonial theory and medieval studies.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participant Information Form (available here: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/) to Shaun Hughes (sfdh@purdue.edu) by September 15. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.